Meetings 1
by Alexandra Spar
Summary: Frodo Baggins meets one of the ladies who write about him, and has a meaningful conversation regarding influenza, bronchial infections, and fate.
1. Default Chapter

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Frodo, more's the pity; he's Tolkien's. Raistlin belongs to his own creators, probably the property of TSR. Alex is me, so I suppose I own her. This is (I hope) a gentle poke at the Sick!Frodo phenomenon. Don't hate me: I love Sick!Frodo, and I write it myself. This is more along the lines of "what if he knew?" Students of medical history will recognize Laennec's protostethoscope.

The air turned itself inside out with a faint _pop_, and a young woman in nondescript brown jerkin and hose, her white hair tied and pinned ruthlessly into a knot at the back of her skull, stood there.

Frodo turned his head on the pillows and gasped. "Who're you?"

"Alex," said Alex, smiling and taking a seat by the bed. "You should know me."

"Oh, Elbereth," he groaned. "You're not one of those dreadful women who write stories about me being ill, are you?"

"Got it in one, beautiful." She leaned back against the chair, smiling. "You really are beautiful, you know. It's unfair. Brings out all our maternal and ministering-angel instincts."

"Well, sod it," he said crossly. "If you like me so much, why do you put me through all this?"

"Think of it as us loving you and wanting to have an opportunity to care for you and make you feel _better_. Unfortunately, that means you have to feel lousy to begin with." She gave him a wry smile. "Sorry. Really. But you have to understand what you _do_ to us."

Frodo laced his fingers behind his head. "Am I really that attractive when I'm white and sweating and near death?"

"Oh yeah. You're so........touchingly vulnerable." Alex sighed. "Your eyes go all dark with helpless pain and your hair falls in a dark tumble over your forehead, and we all swoon. Odd, but there it is."

"Well, what do you want with me this time? Or should I say what are you going to do to me?"

She steepled her fingers and regarded him thoughtfully. "Hmm. Another bout of pneumonia? Some strange malady related to the evil influence of the Ring? Viral gastroenteritis?"

"Oh, no. No more throwing up. Please."

"Darling, I'm very good at holding your head."

"I don't care. I've been sicker than I ever thought anyone could be since you lot got hold of me. I never want to throw up again as long as I live." He shivered.

Alex nodded. "Understandable. How are you on respiratory infections?"

He scowled. "This is all because of the Morgul-wound, isn't it? That's what started you off."

"Well, yes and no. Certainly you'd be more vulnerable to opportunistic infections while your body was weakened by the evil of the Ringwraith's blade—and I have my suspicions it might have nicked the pleura, which gives us a whole other set of options—but you're just so lovely and so fragile that it's easy to see you ill and in need of help." She smiled apologetically and tucked a strand of white hair behind her ear. "What about a nice simple case of seasonal tracheobronchitis?"

"No!"

"Migraines?"

"No!"

"Influenza?"

"You're sick, you know that?" Frodo gave her a considering look. "How come you've got white hair?"

"Because I verge on being a self-insertion Mary Sue in so many of my stories. Thus the yellow eyes, too."

"I was wondering. They're sort of attractive. Not so much yellow as golden."

Alex grinned. "Thanks. I don't have any special powers, though."

"Can't you bilocate or see the future?"

"Nope. I do have the world's biggest collection of useless medical knowledge, though."

"Oh, great." He sighed, shivering a little, and pulled the covers closer around him. "Why don't you write stories about Legolas coughing up his lungs?"

"Because I don't _care_ about Legolas. His eyebrows are wrong." She looked thoughtful. "Although that's an idea, I suppose. Wouldn't he look romantic with dark shadows under his eyes and a quiet little cough?"

"Go with it," said Frodo. "What about, whats-his-name, Haldir?"

She grinned. "You mean Lucius Malfoy's long-lost twin brother? Nope. Not interested."

"Come on, it _has_ to be someone else's turn," said Frodo, shivering. "Aragorn?"

"Never. He's too.......scruffy...to be ill. Microbes are frightened of him."

"Merry? Pippin?"

"Adorable in a different way."

"Elrond?"

Alex laughed, a low rough kind laugh. "Now there's a thought. Agent Smith laid low."

"Agent who?"

"Never mind." She reached out and fluffed his pillows. "Hate to bring this up, Frodo, but you look a little pale. Are you feeling all right?"

Frodo sighed. "No, as a matter of fact I feel like hell. Is it really cold in here, or is it me?"

Alex laid the back of her hand against his cheek. "Oh, dear," she said, gently. "Any dizziness? Localized pain?"

"My chest hurts," he said. "What have you done to me?"

She sighed. "For once, this isn't me, sweetness." She snapped her fingers and a large black handbag appeared in the air beside her, falling with a thud to the floorboards. Rummaging inside it, she came up with a short wooden tube.

"What's that?"

"A listening device," she said, perching on the edge of the bed and beginning to unbutton his nightshirt. "Let's find out what's going on in your chest."

"You just want an excuse to take off my shirt," said Frodo, but he let her set the tube against his chest and listen to the other end.

"Hmm," she said, eyes closed. "Interesting. Can you take a deep breath for me?"

He did so, and coughed a little. "Ow."

She moved the tube, and listened again. "One more time. As deep as you can."

This time the coughing didn't stop, and she sat up and slipped an arm around him, holding him while the spasm ran its course. At length she let him lie back against the pillows, and gave him a wry smile. "Poor Frodo," she said. "How long have you been feeling like this?"

He swallowed painfully and cleared his throat. "A couple of days. It's nothing."

"Like hell." Alex got up and went to the fire, hooked a kettle over the coals. "Did it start with a scratchy throat?"

"Yes," he said. "And yesterday my chest started hurting, and I had this cough. I only started feeling dizzy recently, though."

"I see," she said, fishing in the bag. "Well, you'll be just fine in a couple of days, dear. You really are lucky I'm not adhering to medieval standards of medicine."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Frodo coughed.

"Well, the general treatment for a respiratory infection with upper-lobe congestion was a strong course of emetics and purgatives, possibly with some mercury and antimony thrown in." She shook herbs out of their containers into a beaker. "Not that they had any way to detect the congestion or lobe involvement beyond percussion, which is notoriously unreliable."

"I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about," said Frodo, misery colouring his voice. Alex turned, paused, and came over to the bed.

"Don't worry about it, darling," she said gently. "You'll be fine soon. I'm making you something to help with the cough, and I think I can knock out the infection with what I've got here. Tell me.........have you ever eaten moldy bread?"

"All the time," said Frodo weakly. "There wasn't much else _to_ eat, by the time we got past the Black Gate."

"Right." She smoothed his hair out of his face gently and went back to her potions. "Then you're unlikely to have an allergic reaction to this." The kettle boiled, screaming, and she poured the water over the herbs in the cup. "Good thing Raistlin taught me this recipe, really."

Frodo coughed, trying to muffle it behind his fist. "Who's Raistlin?" he demanded.

"Another health-challenged individual," said Alex mildly, carrying the steaming cup back to the bed. "Try and drink a little. It's not very nasty."

"What is it?"

"Coltsfoot and ginger, with a bit of honey and lemon thrown in. Should loosen your chest up."

Frodo sat up with an effort and took the cup. "Thanks," he said. "I think."

She smiled. "Again," she said, "you're jolly lucky you haven't got anything causing massive secretions, because I'd be happy to show off my knowledge of postural drainage. You'll feel better once you've got that down."

"What was that about mold?" Frodo demanded, sipping the stuff in the beaker. It wasn't that bad, really, and he felt the itch in his chest begin to subside as the warmth of the ginger flooded through him. 

"It's something that might knock out the infection in your chest," she said. "Otherwise, you'll have to wait until your little hobbit immune system clears it, and said little immune system has been sorely taxed recently. Don't worry. It won't hurt."

"Will it make me sick?" 

"Nope." She found what she was looking for in the bag and went back to the fire with a little glass bottle and a hollowed thorn. She held the thorn in the fire for just long enough, before it caught fire, and held it between the tips of her nails as she washed the base of the thorn and the wax seal of the bottle with dwarf spirits. Frodo watched with horrified interest as she thrust the base of the thorn through the seal and upended it, watching as clear droplets formed at the thorntip. 

"What's that?" he quavered.

"An innovation." Alex brought the bottle with its needlethorn attached over to him. "Roll over, dear. This won't hurt much."

"What?"

"Roll over. You could close your eyes, too."

Frodo did as he was ordered. There was a brief sharp pain in his backside, and then Alex was helping him lie back against the pillows. "What the hell did you do to me?"

She put the needle and bottle away. "Nothing bad. Relax." She stroked his hair away from his forehead. "Feeling any better?"

He sighed, leaning his head into her hand. "Not really. My chest still really hurts."

Alex slipped an arm around him, holding him close. He rested his hot face against her shoulder. "Why is it always me?" he asked, in a little voice.

She held him gently, rubbing his back. "Because it is, darling. Just relax. Everything will be all right." He began to cough again, raggedly, and she held him close as his small body was shaken by the spasms. 

"'s....not fair," he managed at last. Alex let him lie back and opened a small bottle; the scent of green apples and rain filled the air in the little room.

"Nothing's fair," she said softly, dipping her fingers in the bottle and rubbing her hands together. "We take what we can get, and live for today."

"What's....that supposed.....to mean?"

"Sorry, I was channeling Jack Higgins for a moment." Alex sighed and bent over him, beginning to rub his chest. The scent of the oil was like ice, numbing and soothing. Her fingers, surprisingly strong, began to ease the tightness in his muscles, and he found himself relaxing slowly. "Just take deep breaths," she said, from a long way away.

Frodo tried, but he found himself drowsing under the gentle influence of her hands. He slid away into dreamless sleep as she finished rubbing his chest and pulled the covers up over him, resuming her seat by the bed.

"I'll be here," she murmured. "As long as you need me, I'll be here."

Frodo stirred and muttered something under his breath. She leaned closer.

".....'s......long as...you don't.........make me puke........"

Alex smiled to herself in the dim room. "Not this time, Frodo Baggins. Not this time."


	2. More meetings

Meetings 2, back by surprisingly popular demand. Oh, have I got some surprises for you lot. 

Disclaimer as before: me no own nuffin 'cept Alex and the Theory of Sappy/Obsessive Fanfic Author –Space (S/OFA-space). Note to Tanglewinde: go look up seventeenth century mechanical physiology and have a look at Christopher Wren's experiments with IV infusion.

Frodo lay in the high white bed, surrounded by the gentle almond-coloured light of Rivendell. He couldn't quite be sure if the light was coming from the walls or from the air itself, and he found he didn't much care. It was pleasant just to lie there and think of nothing, when his fever's mutterings receded enough for him to think at all.

There was another little _pop_ as empty space suddenly became Alex, dressed in a rather nice single-button olive-green wool Oleg Cassini suit. Frodo stared.

"Hi," she said, giving him a little wave. He continued to stare, and she glanced down at herself. "Oh, damn. I came straight from work. Hold on." She snapped her fingers and was suddenly wearing an 1850s nurse's uniform, complete with starched frilly cap, leg o'mutton sleeves, and floor-length apron. "Any better?"

"No...." quavered Frodo. She looked like a small and determined wedding cake. 

Alex sighed and snapped her fingers again, and was wearing a long dark-grey dress with trailing sleeves, clasped with a belt of grey-green stones set in silver. Her hair uncoiled itself and fell in a torrent of white down her back. She cursed sheepishly, and the hair cut itself into a neat chin-length bob. "Sorry. It's my Mary-Sue syndrome. I keep thinking it's got itself under control."

"Right," said Frodo weakly. Alex gave him a crooked smile and sat down, the gems on her girdle glowing blue as she moved. "Why're you here?"

"I'm here to check up on you, my dear," she said. "How do you feel?"

He sighed, and her knuckles went white as she clasped her hands demurely in her lap. "All right," he said after a moment. "Look....the others are getting a bit tired of this. I mean....we have to stop every few days so that Aragorn or Sam can support my fragile shuddering frame through fits of coughing, or worse, and mop my fevered brow, and stare wearily into the dying flames of the campfire while I fall into an exhausted slumber. And frankly, I've had just about enough nursing."

Alex nodded slowly. "They've spoken to you?"

"Not in so many words. Boromir was muttering the other day about how he was damned if he'd let a wretched malingering halfling carry the One Ring when he could jolly well do it himself, and not whine all the time either."

"Is that so?" Alex said quietly. There was an edge to her voice Frodo could only just discern. She seemed to....._blur_ gently for a moment.

_In another part of the elf-city of Imladris, a Man rolls over in his luxurious bed and mutters to himself. He is dreaming of a vast Eye of flame, burning brightly and sickly in the East. There is a dim blur by his bed that could just about be the form of a short slender woman in a grey gown, who bends over him and whispers something in another language; then she is gone._

A few moments later, the sleeper wakens, sits up slowly in an effort to still the rush of dreams in his head, and wipes sweat from his face with a sleeve. Gradually, he begins to shiver; in a few moments more he throws back the covers desperately and bolts for the privy.

Alex tilted her head at Frodo. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing," he said, lying back and rubbing at his eyes. "Must be....more tired than I thought."

She sighed and reached out, resting the back of her hand gently against his cheek. "Poor thing," she said quietly. "Hasn't Elrond done anything for you?"

Frodo turned his head against her hand, resting his brow in her cool palm, his great eyes closed. She could see the darkness of the irises beneath through the delicate skin. "He gives me something bitter to drink, and makes me breathe in steam."

Alex nodded and took out her stethoscope again, listening intently to the noises as he breathed. He coughed a little as she moved the tube; she closed her eyes and thought hard about something else until the fit passed. "All right," she said gently. "You'll be fine. I want you to have a full course of..........er......moldy bread extract, I suppose you'd call it." She rummaged through her bag again as he stared.

"A.......full course? What's that mean?"

"Nothing bad," she said, preoccupied. Jars of unlabeled substances and strange and disturbing items of hardware surfaced as she sifted through the contents of the bag. "Sod it. I'll be right back, sweetheart. Try to get some rest."

Frodo stared at her as if she was insane, which he had fair reasons for believing, and then shut his eyes again in sudden nausea as she _blurred_.

_"Where's your glassblower?"_

Lord Elrond looked up slowly. "I beg your pardon?"

"Don't mess me about, your lordship. Where is your resident glassblower? I'm sure you have one."

"Yes of course we do......who are you, miss, and what are you doing in my private library? If I may be so bold as to inquire, that is."

"Y'know," she said slowly, "you really are nothing like the Patrician. That's odd. I'd always thought you'd have at least some similarities. My card." 

She held out a rectangle of slightly dog-eared white cardboard to the elflord. He took it between thumb and forefinger and looked down his not inconsiderable nose at it.

"What is all this about epidemiology?" he asked mildly. "And 'obscure medical trivia?' And 'strange but harmless fetish for beautiful sick men?'"

"My qualifications, lord. Look, can I see your damn glassblower or not?"

"This is about the Ringbearer, isn't it," said Elrond quietly. Alex went pink.

"Nnnoooo."

"Well, at least you aren't like the hordes I get in here every day squealing for Legolas. The Prince of Mirkwood, I might remind you."

"Yes, I hear he has quite a following."

"Despite the fact that his eyebrows are quite un-elven," said Elrond. "I've had to post a guard outside his room armed with the strongest soporifics I know. Then I've got the duty of sending them all back to their own world with nothing wrong except a headache. Really, if I'd known this sort of thing would happen, I'd have refused to open the city to anyone except very unattractive, very unromantic individuals. Like gnolls." He paused, savoring the thought. "Imladris overrun by gnolls. Imagine the blessed silence. No fangirls squeaking."

"Sounds very nice, but can I please see your glassblower?"

Elrond sighed and got up. "Very well. I must say, Frodo is greatly improved. Did you do something to him?"

Alex shrugged. "Nothing the people of my world wouldn't do in a heartbeat. Er, my lord, do you have any bread that's gone moldy? I need...a certain kind of mold."

Elrond paused and stared at her. "Come with me."

"But the glassblower—"

"Come with me," he said, and there was mithril in his tone. Alex gave up and followed his regally sweeping robes down a wide white corridor she hadn't seen before.

He led her into a light and airy workshop, crowded with complicated glass flasks and tubing that looked as if it might have been produced by a small and chemistry-oriented tornado. Alex grinned like a shark and lit several burners before Elrond had even finished locking the door behind them.

"This is perfect, my lord!"she grinned, crumbling herbs into a beaker. "Do I dare hope you've had the same train of thought as me?

Elrond sighed. "I dread to think what train of thought that might have been."

She grinned. "Well, there are a few. Have you been playing with chemical dyes yet?"

"No," said Elrond. "Should I be?"

"Well,"she said, "you'll find that several of the more brilliant dyes have bacteriostatic effects...................oh. Are you familiar with bacteria, my lord?"

Some time later, she rubbed at the growing knots of tension in her shoulders, watching Elrond peer through a hastily-cobbled-together sequence of crystal lenses at the things on the glass slide. "Fascinating," he muttered. "Tiny animalcules—too small to see—are behind all the diseases of our world?"

"Not all of them, my lord. In this case, those little dots we stained dark red are what's causing Frodo's illness. Looks like a streptococcus to me, but I'm really not sure. Nevertheless—this is a perfect example of an antibiotic-naive population, and I think I can help."

Elrond straightened up and stared at her. "Who are you, anyway?"

She fought the urge to say, in a bad German accent, "Just a traveler searching for purity." Instead, she gave him a weary smile and said "Just someone who wants to help. Now...have you got any thin glass tubes I could borrow? And a blowtorch?"

When Frodo opened his eyes again, she was sitting by his bed demure as ever, hands folded in her lap. "What the hell was that?"

"What was what?"

"You blurred," he said crossly. "Stop doing that."

"Sorry. Just a function of warping time and space."

"A function of who?" said Frodo, looking at her with wide, sky-colored, helpless eyes. She shivered.

"Suffice it to say that I, and my fellow obsessives, have found a way to move around in space and time. It's because of the theory of S-OFA-space."

"Sofa space?" inquired Frodo, pulling the covers tighter around him. This one was mental.

"Sappy Obsessive Fanfic Author." She gave him a wry smile. "We transcend the laws of physics. That's how so many of your devoted fans make their way to Middle-Earth, develop long flowing hair of interesting colours, and show up in convenient points in your narrative. I bet you were wondering how Legolas managed to get so many of his women here without anyone letting them through the gates."

"I was curious," said Frodo weakly, and found himself shaken with another fit of coughing. The slightly deranged light in Alex's yellow eyes died away, and she sighed.

"Poor thing. You'll be happy to know Elrond and I are working together on your case," she said, brushing his hair gently out of his face. "And I've improved my injection technique."

Frodo swallowed painfully. "Do I want to know?"

"Probably not." Alex extracted a slim wooden case from her bag. Inside, on a bed of grey velvet, lay a glass tube elongated and stretched at one end to form a long, delicate crystal point. It glittered.

"You're not going to......."

"I'm afraid so. But this one won't hurt nearly so much," she said, lifting the thing out of its box. Inside the crystal cylinder was set a thin metal rod with a disc at one end, which seemed to slide in and out of the tube. She fished out another of the little bottles sealed with wax, and washed the top of it with dwarf spirits before passing the tip of the needlepoint through a flame and piercing the wax seal. Frodo, despite himself, watched in fascinated horror as she drew up the clear fluid from the bottle into the crystal tube. She squinted at the tip. "Roll over."

Despite the indignity, Frodo couldn't help noticing that she was right; the crystal needle hardly hurt at all compared to the hollow thorn she had used before. She let him lie back and pulled the covers up over him gently, setting the needle back into its case. "There......I'm sorry, sweetheart, but it's necessary."

Frodo sighed, shivering a little in the warm air of the room. "Alex?"

"Yes?" She was mixing up herbs in a little bowl—something that smelled sharp and sweet. 

"Alex....if it's not you who's making me ill......who is it?"

"That I aim to find out, Frodo." She poured hot water over the herbs, stirring, eyes downcast. "I expect it's terribly dramatic."

"It always is," he said petulantly. "I wish the Ring had never come to me."

She set a small steaming cup on the table by his bed. "Oh, Frodo......."

"Well.....it's true. I wish I'd stayed in the Shire and been nice and boring and........and _respectable_." His voice shook a little; he was weakened enough to cry easily, although he didn't want to cry in front of her. 

She sighed and bent over and took him in her arms. "I know, Frodo. I know.....it isn't fair, any of it. You've carried a burden far too heavy for far too long."

He lay against her, coughing a little. "I just want to go home."

"You will. In time." She held him gently, rubbing his back. "Everything will be all right."

He muttered something into her shoulder as the coughing increased, and she hissed in sympathy and held him tight as the spasm shook him. Eventually it eased, and she let him lie back against the pillows, gasping, face greyish-white.

"Can you try to drink a little of this?" she asked softly. He took the cup in shaking fingers, and she steadied his hands with hers. The mixture tasted sweet and sharp at once, with a hint of smoke in it, but it dulled some of the pain in his throat and chest. Slowly, he finished the cup, and she gave him a sweet, tired smile. "Try and sleep," she told him. 

"Don't go," he croaked, clinging to her hand.

"I wouldn't dream of it," she assured him softly. "You'll be safe with me."

Elrond peered in some little time later, and smiled a little at the sight of the stranger curled in a chair designed for someone six inches taller than her, clasping the Ringbearer's narrow hand in hers. He had meant to ask her if she knew anything about Boromir's sudden and acute attack of gastrointestinal unhappiness, but decided it could wait. He sauntered off back to his workroom, and the interesting theories she had hinted at. Something about chemical dyes?

Peace fell over Imladris with the dusk, except for in one room, where a certain Man was trying very hard not to cry for his mommy.


	3. The Villainesses at Large

More of it!

And further onwards. In this installment, we discover the true reason for our hero's indisposition, and the brave Alex battles armies of darkness, sepsis and outdated thinking. I'm sorry, I have absolutely no sympathy for Boromir. None. If I ever met him I'd have no problem with whapping him repeatedly with a stick. Same goes for the movie versions of Faramir and Eowyn. Whap!

We go deeper into the dark heart of my rather unhealthy psyche with this chapter. You may not enjoy it. You also may find it extremely boring, if you have no background in the harsh and bitchy world of medical history.

So, with the disclaimer that I own nothing in this story save my own neuroses and Alex, I bring you Meetings 3: Galen Goes Down. (Formerly titled "Galen v. Paracelsus: The Cage Match.")

In the gently babbling darkness of the river city, dim lights burned here and there as insomniac elves wrote their memoirs, desperate fangirls queued outside the firmly locked door of Legolas's private chambers, and one art history graduate desperately tried to remember her organic chemistry.

"Sod," said Alex after a while, dropping her pen and walking over to the great windows of Elrond's laboratory. The elflord had given up and gone to bed, pleading the need to pluck his eyebrows before repose, and left her to tinker with her extracts. She lit a cigarette, staring out at the darkness. Something was badly wrong.

Under higher magnification (produced by another hastily-thrown-together microscope, the lenses ground out of clear rock crystal and clamped in elegant steel rims which seemed to have developed the branchlike decoration common to all objects in Rivendell) the things she'd originally thought to be _S. pneumoniae_ weren't, in fact. They looked remarkably convincing under low power—little encapsulated cocci that clung together in long strings—but with higher magnification, they didn't look so much like bacteria as little tiny dark beads, almost as if Frodo had inhaled a large quantity of minuscule polished onyx spheres.

Which was unlikely. Alex blew a smoke ring through the expanding center of its predecessor, and sighed. She was resolutely not thinking about what she thought she'd seen on the surfaces of those spheres. It would have to wait until she could get a better look at the slide—possibly taking it to an actual pathology lab, although she wasn't at all sure that anything organic from this plane would be able to move with her through time or space. Everything she had here was something she'd either made here or summoned from another annex of SOFA-space. The protostethoscope came from one of her older stories; the red thorn and the wax-sealed bottles from a story she'd read long ago. It was difficult to make things fit in from other worlds. She was in fact rather impressed with Elrond's acceptance of her suggestions, and with the progress he had already made.

But she really wanted a closer look at the little black dots in her sample.

She'd worked with Elrond to extract some of the active principles in the herbal mixtures he was already using. The old methods of concentrating and reducing, by pressing the herbs and steeping them in oil, worked to an extent; she'd managed to use what little she knew of chemical extraction and basic distillation to produce much purer concentrates of tussilago, ephedra, hyssop, feverfew, willow-bark, cherry bark, valerian, and the rest of the mainstays Elrond kept in his dispensary. She was pleased to note that they'd twigged to the narcotic properties of poppy juice, and that the one small vial of it in the cupboard was kept under lock and key.

Alex put out her cigarette in a glass dish already half-full of crushed cigarette ends and went back to the bench. She'd set up a very basic steam-distillation still, connecting a glass boiling-flask to a metal double-boiler topped by an alembic head with a long condensation coil—the sort of thing you saw in seventeenth century woodcuts.The water in the steam-generation flask under her still had almost boiled dry; she checked her watch, then blew out the flame under the flask and sat back, regarding the slow drip of the condensing fluid flowing down its coil. The sweet, heady fragrance of honeysuckle rose from the still, almost covering the stronger smells of alcohol and redfoil juice, which served as an antiseptic.

She watched as the last few drops detached themselves from the tip of the coil, and held the collection flask up to the light. A thin layer of oil floated on top of the water: the essential oil of the honeysuckle flowers and fronds, which could now be separated into its integral parts and purified.

_Why don't I just go and find a bloody alchemist to do this for me? _she wondered, _or leave it to Elrond and his elven lab assistants? They seem perfectly competent._

Because I'm a meddling busybody, that's why, she answered herself, and decanted the oil into a separate phial, sealing it with wax. _Because I want to do everything my way._

She sighed and put the phial with its fellows on the shelf, and went back to the bench. Time to check on Frodo, and maybe find out what he'd been doing to get himself infected with things that were pretending to be bacteria—and quite effectively acting like them—but weren't. Or were an entirely new kind of bacteria.

***

A dark tower, and a blasted heath; a wasteland and a maimed king, a river tinged with blood and a citadel fallen to mossy ruin with the turning of the years; a coming-together of stories and of concepts, a nexus of imagination, a meeting-place of the mind.

Or, if you think of it in less elegiac terms, an annex of SOFA-space inhabited by individuals who call themselves, without a hint of irony, The Dark Side.

One of them, Lady Sepulchravia de Mortuis, a slender maiden with death-pale skin finer than porcelain, eyes like dove's eyes and raven tresses that swept the ground as she walked, rose from her ebony throne and approached the Dark Palantir that hung turning in the air in the center of the chamber. "My sisters," she hissed, in a sweet, dead voice like rustling leaves, "he is in danger of escaping our influence."

Her compatriot Aurilienduilienar Eosiriel, called the Morningstar (hair the colour of slow-flowing venous blood and slightly shorter than Sepulchravia's, eyes the deep green of triple-distilled absinthe) leaned back in her chair, steepling fingers tipped with inch-long obsidian nails. "He will not escape. It is his destiny to come to us. He is written that way."

"He is _written_," said a third, Enitharmon Urizelaien (silver floor-length hair arranged in a crescent behind her head, dark midnight-blue eyes), "to be beautiful, and fragile, and full of sorrows. He is not _destined_ for our clutches, sisters. We must fight for him."

"Enitharmon, you have insufficient faith," said Sepulchravia absently, regarding the palantir. "He will be ours. Already our influence grows in his body. His mind will soon follow."

"Then the elves have not found the source of his illness?" hissed Aurilienduilienar. "They know not of our involvement?"

"There is an interloper," said the Dark Lady. "One of our ilk, who is not yet as we are. Her powers are puny compared to ours. Men fail to fall at her feet; kingdoms have not hung in the balance over her. No one has even threatened suicide for lack of her favours."

"A moment's work," said Enitharmon, smiling a bright and cruel smile. "We shall destroy her utterly, and make her as dust."

"Of course," said Sepulchravia. "Yet be warned, my dark sisterhood, the intruder is armed with the knowledge of another world. Already she has slowed the influence of our power upon the Ringbearer. Remove her, and he will be ours, to do with as we desire."

"_I_ desire to have him inhabit my quarters wearing nothing but a very fine mithril robe," said Aurilienduilienar. "And carrying a peacock-feather fan."

"We all know what you desire," snapped Sepulchravia. "You may take your turn when he is in our hands."

"You'll get him first, no doubt," said Enitharmon sulkily. "You get everyone first."

"Well, I am the loveliest of us," said Sepulchravia reasonably. "Lord Sauron himself knelt at my dainty feet and vowed he would destroy all Middle-Earth in my name."

"That's nothing," said Aurilienduilienar. "The Dark Lord Voldemort clasped me to his frigid bosom and muttered heartbroken oaths to me, calling me "his darkness" and "his abyss of refuge.""

"Yeah, well, I had that Devil guy all over me," said Enitharmon. "Offering me forbidden fruit, and that."

Aurilienduilienar and Sepulchravia shared a long-suffering older-sister look. "Enitharmon," said Sepulchravia after a moment, "shut up."

They had been called many things in their long lives; the Fates, the Kindly Ones, the Dark Sisters; but now, in this universe of change and of imagination, they had found their true niche as the Obsessors. From their dark tower on the blasted wasteland of what could have been Mordor, or 19th century industrial Yorkshire, or the Northlands beyond Damar, or the burning plains of Hell, they ruled through fiction, through the realms of dream and imagination. Their influence lay everywhere, from the inescapable popularity of bad vampire movies, to the ever-growing hordes of tubby teenage girls with eyebrow piercings and too much white pancake makeup who called themselves things like "Lady Death" and carried purses designed to look like coffins, to the little core of pure unpleasantness at the heart of every human being. Dark hearts were the majority, they had found, and it was so easy to tweak those darknesses just a little, just enough to produce irritation, annoyance, obnoxious behaviour, and pretentious self-importance. Ruling from their black pinnacle, the three Ladies of the Eternal Night (their hair wrapped about them in flowing ebony, argent and scarlet tresses) ruled their domain, and influenced the minds of men.

In this case, they were taking advantage of a mild oddity already present in their victims, and working from that platform. They knew, from their experience with the nineteenth century poets and playwrights, that the tortured, beautiful invalid male was one of the most powerful images in the minds of women. And knowing that, they moved into the fiction that could contain such images, and made it more so; leaned upon it with all the force of their combined strength. Examples of this include the film version of Chopin's life, _Impromptu_; the delightful extension of the old folktale _Sleepy Hollow_; and the more recent extravaganza based on the most classic Quest Pattern Story ever written, _The Lord of the Rings._ The hero of the latter was gently nudged by the power of the Dark Queens from being just a small being on a large quest to an ethereally beautiful young man struggling to stay alive under a burden far too heavy for him to bear. They watched with approval as young women everywhere felt a brilliant warm upwelling of adoration and anxiety over Frodo, and as they began to create stories about healing the Ringbearer of his admittedly myriad illnesses.

But now something different had taken the stage.Generally, the women who wrote sick Frodo stories knew a little of medieval medicine, enough to make their tales believable. The introduction of eighteenth and nineteenth, not to mention twentieth century medicinal innovations into the paradigm would cause the waveform to collapse. What efficacy did an ill wish have against crystal penicillin?

"She must be stopped, sisters," hissed Sepulchravia, her beauty luminous in the dim light of the palantir. "She must be stopped, or we are lost."

"It is noted," said Aurilienduilienar quietly. "She will be stopped."

tbc


	4. Conflicts of interest

I am such a bitch, aren't I? I didn't really mean the last chapter to be so nasty towards my fellow obsessives, but I can't help thinking that venomous Mary Sues (besides being a dime a dozen) are just too easy to make fun of. The Dark Ladies are thinly veiled versions of characters I've read over and over again in hundreds of stories, either originals or fanfics; modern, badly-spelled and ungrammatical versions of Coleridge's Geraldine (or the Nightmare Life-in-Death), or Stoker's "bloofer lady," or any one of Voldemort's putative wives, lovers,  sisters, daughters or mothers, about whom you may read to your heart's content in the Harry Potter section of this site. The Evil Mary Sue has become a stereotype on the order of the Unlikely Hero or the Comic-Relief Best Friend. It's open season on her, my dears, as you will soon see.

Disclaimer: as before, LOTR and its characters and related indicia are the property of the Tolkien estate, no copyright infringement intended and no money being made. 

MEETINGS 4

            "What _have you been doing?" inquired Elrond, sweeping into the laboratory with a flourish of embroidered robes. "It smells like a distillery in here."_

            Alex looked up at him with bleary eyes. "How appropriate," she said. "What brings you here, my lord?" She was still bent over the workbench, having spent the night trying to extract the active principle of _athelas_ and failing miserably. It was quite unlike any other herb she'd ever met, and its actions in vitro seemed to be, for lack of a better word, magical.

            "I need some poppy juice," said Elrond, crossing to the cupboard. "And wormwood. Where'd you put the wormwood?"

            "Third shelf, green bottle." Alex yawned. "Who wants absinthe at this time of the morning?"

            "Not absinthe," said the elflord, carrying several bottles to the table. "Poor Boromir is no better.  I had hoped a good night's sleep would ease him, but....." He trailed off, measuring, the tiny green bottle held up to the light.

            "What's wrong with Boromir?" asked Alex, innocently.

            "He seems to have eaten something that violently disagreed with him," Elrond said mildly. "I've not seen anyone be sick so many times since the last time Frodo was brought here for aid. I was going to ask you if you had any idea what might have caused it."

            She shrugged. "I haven't the foggiest. Apparently he does commit dietary indiscretions, however. He probably just got a bad mushroom or something."

            "Nevertheless," said Elrond, "he can keep nothing down, and the purging is quite dramatic. It will take him days to regain his strength."

            Alex kept her face perfectly straight as she watched him stirring a dark syrupy liquid in a beaker. "How sad," she said.

            "Indeed. You could come with me and hold his head, if you're not doing anything important. Here." He tossed her a long pale robe with wide sleeves, which she put on over her grey gown. "It will afford you some little protection," he added.

            Alex nodded and followed Elrond out of the workroom, down long echoing almond-coloured hallways lit by a strange sourceless glow and decorated with branching featherlike patterns, past little courtyards alive with sparkling fountains and swaying rose branches, through chambers inhabited by pale elves playing chess in velvet dressing-gowns, to a suite of rooms not unlike the one Frodo lay in. It was dim; a faint sour smell hung on the air.

            She noticed vaguely that Elrond was giving off a very pale glow in the darkness, as if he was slightly radioactive. The lines of his robes seemed limned in faint light. _Now that is interesting. I wonder if all elves glow in the dark, or only the healers? _

            He bent over Boromir, who stirred and groaned weakly. Alex stood back with her arms folded and tried to keep a nasty smile from spreading on her face. "Boromir," said Elrond gently. "Can you drink a little of this?"

            She circled round to the other side of the bed and slipped an arm behind the Man's shoulders, helping him to sit up. Elrond administered a spoonful of his mixture, and they both waited to see what would happen. She was in time to get the basin from the bedside table, and for a few moments they were busy with cleaning him up; he moaned miserably and tried to twist out of their grasp. "Be brave, Boromir," she told him, not unkindly.  "You're not the only person in the world to have been ill."

            "Indeed," said Elrond, a little crossly; one of his beautifully embroidered sleeves had received a little extra decoration. "Young Frodo was terribly brave when he had this, a few months ago. Buck up, man."

            "....'m.......dying...." groaned Boromir.

            "No you aren't." Alex took the syrup from Elrond. "Let's try again."

            As she spooned opium and artemisia into Boromir's mouth, she took the curse off; and this time the medicine stayed down. "There. Now get some rest, you'll feel ever so much better when you wake up."

            He curled up on his side under the covers. She grinned to herself; it would be a while, she thought, before he said anything about malingering halflings again. And if he did, it was the work of a moment to lay a constant low-grade stimulation to the nerves that governed his gastrointestinal tract.

            Elrond looked at her consideringly, but said nothing; he pulled the covers more snugly around the snoring Boromir and set a glass of water on the bedside table before leading her out of the room. In daylight, the glow he gave off was totally unnoticeable.

            "You are a strange person, Alex," he said absently as they returned to the workroom. "Very strange indeed."

            "Thank you, your lordship."

            **

            Frodo tossed feverishly, his hair clinging damply to his forehead, muttering something about a dark heart in a tide of silver. Despite her crude antibiotic therapy, his fever had risen, and risen again, and his cough was tight and painful and low in his chest. More than ever she wanted a closer look at the little things pretending to be bacteria, but it would have to wait until more powerful lenses could be ground, and they were having a difficult time finding crystal of the right clarity. All she—and Elrond—could do was to treat his symptoms empirically, bathe him in cool water when the fever rose too high, try and ease his pain. Alex hated to admit it, but she had no idea what was wrong with him.

            "It is unnatural," said Elrond quietly, after they had left his room. "Unnatural. Something dark is eating at him from the inside."

            "But it doesn't make _sense_," she wailed. "None of it."

            They were disturbed by Legolas, who poked his blond head round the workroom door with the air of one who hopes to catch his superior in an embarrassing position. "Lord Elrond," he said. "We have guests."

            ***

            "So you are healers too?" inquired Elrond, seated in his throne-chair with his fingers steepled and his arched eyebrows raised a little further. Alex was standing unobtrusively behind the pillars at the edge of the hall; every other pair of eyes was fixed firmly on the three tall, slender figures who stood before Elrond.

            The tallest, whose black hair was unbound and reached to the floor, made a deep obeisance. "We have a little skill, my lord. My name is Sepulchravia de Mortuis. These are my sisters, Aurilienduilienar Eosiriel the Morningstar and Enitharmon Urizelaien. We come to serve you, and to study under you."

            "I see," said Elrond, a little weakly. "And...such high-born ladies have studied in a House of Healing?"

            Sepulchravia's perfect porcelain face tightened briefly. "My lord, our past is not a happy one. We have been driven from our home. I...." She bowed her lovely head. Elrond blinked a few times, as if to clear his vision.

            "I am sorry," he said. "Your business is your own. I welcome you to Rivendell,  my ladies. We are glad to see you come."

            All three of them curtseyed to him with deep, slow grace. "We are honoured, Lord Elrond," said Sepulchravia. "May we be allowed to visit the Ringbearer?"

            Alex, watching, felt her hands curl into fists. They were so _beautiful, all three of them, as lovely as Elves but without that odd otherworldliness the Elves wore like a crown; they were tall and slender and curved in and out at the right places and she wanted to kick them all firmly in the shins. And those _names_! One of them was a blatant rip-off of a William Blake character; one of them, Tomb of the Dead, had stolen her first name from Mervyn Peake; and the third had thrown a bunch of Tolkien's female names into a blender, hit "puree," and tacked on a bit of Milton as a title. Honestly. And none of them had hair that stopped before their ankles._

            She shivered. Unless she was blessedly wrong, the three things that stood before Elrond's throne were some of the most purely evil beings ever to traverse SOFA-space. 

            Well. Fire could be fought with fire. Stepping back into the shadows, Alex closed her eyes and concentrated; she appeared to  glow faintly purple as the air molecules around her hit the intense temporal field and were immediately ripped apart. Her hair rippled and grew, falling down her back in its white torrent; her face changed subtly, her nose shrinking and becoming charmingly retrousse, her cheekbones sculpting themselves, her lips becoming fuller. Similar alterations manifested themselves beneath her gown; it found itself suddenly clinging to a much riper and curvier form, and then the gown itself changed into a long white kirtle last seen in a Pre-Raphaelite painting called _The Accolade_. White gems sparkled at her throat and waist; when she opened her eyes, their owl-yellow had become a deep tawny burnished gold, the lashes sooty black and much thicker than they had any right to be in a time before Max Factor. She smiled a curvy smile and stepped out of the shadows.

            "My ladies," she said, and her voice was low and sweet and clear. "May I show you our little workroom?"

            "Who are you?" demanded the silver-haired one, eyeing her hair.

            "I am Alessandriella," she said. "I, too, know a little of healing."

            Elrond swallowed, staring at her. She gave him a little smile and led the three strangers out of the audience hall. On purpose, she walked just fast enough so that they had to lift their trailing skirts to keep up with her. 

            She led them to Frodo's room, not without a little hesitation; these were some of the most powerful and unpleasant individuals she had ever met, and it took all her strength to stand idly by while they examined the feverish hobbit. The redhead and the silver-haired one hung back while Sepulchravia had a look; then they took their turns.

            "Well, my ladies?" said Alex, deferentially. "I await your wisdom."

            Sepulchravia straightened up and flicked her indescribable hair away from her face. "He is clearly suffering from an imbalance of the humours," she pronounced. "He must be bled at once. The sanguine and choleric temperaments are at war within him."

            "Nay, my sister," said the redhead with the long and unpronounceable name. "This is a disorder of heat. I concur that he must be bled immediately,  and treated with cooling preparations, but it is not the humours which lie at the cause of his infirmity."

            "I disagree,"said the silver-haired Enitharmon. "The theory of the four humours is out of date. He requires purging and firm doses of spirits of hartshorn, antimony and quicksilver."

            Alex rubbed at her forehead. _I've  got a Galenist, a follower of Sydenham, and a Paracelsan in the same room. Shouldn't one of us be exploding right about now?_

            "My ladies," she began. "If I might suggest something." All three of them turned to stare at her. "Bleeding would be….ill-advised at this stage of his illness. He needs all the strength he can get."

            "Speak not of what you do not know," said Sepulchravia coldly. "Bring me the fleam and blood-stick. We must save his life."

            "Nay, leave the bleeding," said Enitharmon. "You must have senna and cascara to hand, surely? And syrup of squills? We must purge him of this disease, both upwards and down."

            "My ladies," said Alex dryly, "please to follow me. I will bring you to our workroom where you may prepare draughts for him as you desire."

            "But the bleeding!"

            "We have no equipment for blood-letting, my lady. If you will allow me, I will see if I can find an appropriate knife."

            Grudgingly, the three women let themselves be shepherded from Frodo's room to the laboratory. Alex closed the door behind them and turned the bolt so gently that none of them heard the wards of the lock sliding home. She hurried back to Frodo, who was stirring.

            "What….who were those women?" he murmured.

            "They are the cause of your illness, I have no doubt," she whispered. "They're evil, Frodo. Pure evil."  

            "But they are so beautiful!"

            "Poison can be fair," she said dryly. "Listen to me. They want to take most of your blood away, fill you full of heavy metals and make you throw up. All in the cause of healing you, of course."

            "They…what?"

            "Don't worry. I won't let them get away with it.  Nevertheless I need to do a bit more research on how exactly they've made you ill, so that I can reverse the process. Tell me—did you encounter anything strange before you fell sick? Anything remarkable?"

            Frodo tossed his head feverishly, dark hair clinging to his forehead and slipping down the pillows like rain. "There was…a dark mist," he managed. "Days ago. Before I came to Rivendell….it hung in the hollows like shadows, and seemed to follow us…"

            "A dark mist?" Alex thought hard; it reminded her of Aboriginal reports of black winds scouring the land after the British nuclear tests at Maralinga. "And you fell ill afterwards?"

            "Not for a few days," he murmured, coughing. "We were already most of the way here….it only started once we'd arrived. You were there."

            She nodded slowly. "I see." Perhaps the dark mist had contained the little black spheres in his lungs. She couldn't think of anywhere else they might've come from.

            "You didn't feel anything….strange?"

            "You mean like the Ring?" he asked, coughing. She nodded. "Not really. There was an….uneasiness in the air, if you like….a feeling that things were changing beyond my control. Sting was glowing. I thought it was just the moonlight, but now…"

            She sighed. "I see. I'll do my best to spare you their ministrations, but I think Elrond's already been bewitched by their dark beauty, etcetera."

            Frodo moaned, inching down under the covers. "Alex, I'm frightened."

            "I know, love," she said quietly. "I know." She was sitting on the edge of his bed, and she took him in her arms and held him gently, trying to give him a little comfort in a terrifying world.


End file.
